McCurtayne has a wealth of experience in implementing GS1net with wine company Cheviot Bridge. GS1 Australia’s Industry Manager for the liquor industry, Andrew Steele describes her as a GS1net veteran.

According to Steele, Cheviot Bridge was an early adopter of GS1net within the liquor industry, and is GS1net Live with both Coles and Australian Liquor Marketers.

Cheviot Bridge has been proactive in using the GS1 standards and GS1 Australia’s services to meet their business requirements.

McCurtayne attended an EANnet seminar (GS1net was formerly EANnet) in February 2007. Thanks to a Coles representative at the seminar who wanted to engage their top 25 liquor suppliers through GS1net, Cheviot Bridge signed up for GS1net.

In consultation with middleware suppliers, Cheviot Bridge opted for the browser upload template in GS1net as they had less than 100 products.

GS1 Australia’s Professional Services team helped them use the Fast Track service to load 60 Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) and the associated data in just three days. They have been using GS1net with Coles ever since.

At a subsequent GS1net seminar McCurtayne discussed further data integration options with a representative from the pharmaceutical sector who told her about DaisyChain EDI, an affordable solution that would enable them to begin electronic invoicing with Coles.

Exchanging electronic messages with Coles also involves using the Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC) label to uniquely identify their stock on pallets.

Once Cheviot Bridge began exchanging data electronically with Coles, they discovered they could also do so with Woolworths although they were not yet on GS1net.

The Global Trade Identification Number (GTIN) is the key enabler of the system, uniquely identifying the product or carton in the GS1net catalogue as well as on the physical product via the GS1 bar code.

Cheviot Bridge is also using GS1net with Australian Liquor Marketers (ALM) and has set up EDI with Metcash for purchase orders. They are also working with data recipients ILG, HLW and Victorian wholesalers SIL to replace manual spreadsheets with electronic data exchange.

McCurtayne has joined a technical work group on the Liquor Merchants Association of Australia (LMAA) Industry Market Read (IMR) project.

According to McCurtayne, while the GS1net process involves a lot of effort, the benefits outweigh the hard work as the system eliminates paper-based forms, reduces error from manual data entry and ensures accurate pricing, eliminating pricing claims.

She adds that they hope to integrate their invoicing systems with their electronic trading to further reduce manual processes with the help of GS1net.

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